In order to improve page load time for users around the world we’re going to try serving externally hosted images (used in item descriptions, forum posts and other user content areas) through a Content Delivery Network called Cloudfront.

Before rendering the page we re-write the image tags in your content to serve them through an image proxy service with Cloudfront on top. The image proxy gets the image from the external server and passes it along to Cloudfront, which will cache the image based on the cache headers the external server responded with.

The first step is a trial to a small percentage of users for short periods of time over the next couple of days so that we can measure load times and monitor for errors. If you notice any strange behaviour that may be related to this please let us know in this thread.

During this trial, any changes that you make to your images may not be shown to all users unless you also change the URL of the image. Everything will go back to normal at the end of the trial, and we’ll document this in detail if it becomes a permanent feature.

Some authors use inline images to get stats and count of page views, this will break their stat.

The image counters we’ve looked at so far all respond with no-cache in the Cache-Control header. This tells Cloudfront not to cache the image and always request it from the origin server, so page view counting should still work.

I’ll probably get shot for saying this, but rewriting to cloudfront will overcome one of the biggest hurdles for getting marketplace wide ssl…. * hides * ... authors wont have to get their own ssl hosting for preview images/forum images/etc..

Hey devs, could you please consider adding the original file name at the end of the cloudfront rewritten url (eg: ....29823472/original.jpg) ? I’ve always tried to name my item images as descriptive as possible for what tiny little seo benefit it may have.